Someone Comes to Town, Someone Leaves Town, Cory Doctorow [big ebook reader .txt] 📗

exactly, are you doing up there, Al?" Kurt said, when he
finally stumbled out of bed and down the road for his afternoon
breakfast coffee.

"Larry's letting us put up an access point," he said, wiping the pigeon
shit off a wire preparatory to taping it down. He descended the ladder
and wiped his hands off on his painter's pants. "That'll be ten bucks,
please."

Kurt dug out a handful of coins and picked out enough loonies and
toonies to make ten dollars, and handed it over. "You talked the Greek
into it?" he hissed. "How?"

"I kissed his ass without insulting his intelligence."

"Neat trick," Kurt said, and they had a little partner-to-partner
high-five. "I'd better login to that thing and get it onto the network,
huh?"

"Yeah," Anders said. "I'm gonna order some lunch, lemme get you
something."

#

What they had done, was they had hacked the shit out of those boxes that
Kurt had built in his junkyard of a storefront of an apartment.

"These work?" Alan said. He had three of them in a big catering tub from
his basement that he'd sluiced clean. The base stations no longer looked
like they'd been built out of garbage. They'd switched to low-power
Mini-ATX motherboards that let them shrink the hardware down to small
enough to fit in a 50-dollar all-weather junction box from Canadian
Tire.

Adam vaguely recognized the day's street-kids as regulars who'd been
hanging around the shop for some time, and they gave him the hairy
eyeball when he had the audacity to question Kurt. These kids of Kurt's
weren't much like the kids he'd had working for him over the years. They
might be bright, but they were a lot...angrier. Some of the girls were
cutters, with knife scars on their forearms. Some of the boys looked
like they'd been beaten up a few times too many on the streets, like
they were spoiling for a fight. Alan tried to unfocus his eyes when he
was in the front of Kurt's shop, to not see any of them too closely.

"They work," Kurt said. He smelled terrible, a combination of garbage
and sweat, and he had the raccoon-eyed jitters he got when he stayed up
all night. "I tested them twice."

"You built me a spare?" Alan said, examining the neat lines of hot glue
that gasketed the sturdy rubberized antennae in place, masking the
slightly melted edges left behind by the drill press.

"You don't need a spare," Kurt said. Alan knew that when he got touchy
like this, he had to be very careful or he'd blow up, but he wasn't
going to do another demo Kurt's way. They'd done exactly one of those,
at a Toronto District School Board superintendents meeting, when Alan
had gotten the idea of using schools' flagpoles and backhaul as test
beds for building out the net. It had been a debacle, needless to
say. Two of the access points had been permanently installed on either
end of Kurt's storefront and the third had been in storage for a month
since it was last tested.

One of the street kids, a boy with a pair of improbably enormous raver
shoes, looked up at Alan. "We've tested these all. They work."

Kurt puffed up and gratefully socked the kid in the shoulder. "We did."

"Fine," Adam said patiently. "But can we make sure they work now?"

"They'll work," Kurt had said when Alan told him that he wanted to test
the access points out before they took them to the meeting. "It's
practically solid-state. They're running off the standard
distribution. There's almost no configuration."

Which may or may not have been true -- it certainly sounded plausible to
Alan's lay ear -- but it didn't change the fact that once they powered
up the third box, the other two seized up and died. The blinking network
lights fell still, and as Kurt hauled out an old VT-100 terminal and
plugged it into the serial ports on the backs of his big, ugly,
bestickered, and cig-burned PC cases, it became apparent that they had
ceased to honor all requests for routing, association, deassociation,
DHCP leases, and the myriad of other networking services provided for by
the software.

"It's practically solid-state," Kurt said, nearly *shouted*, after he'd
powered down the third box and found that the other two -- previously
routing and humming along happily -- refused to come back up into their
known-good state. He gave Alan a dirty look, as though his insistence on
preflighting were the root of their problems.

The street-kid who'd spoken up had jumped when Kurt raised his voice,
then cringed away. Now as Kurt began to tear around the shop, looking
through boxes of CDs and dropping things on the floor, the kid all but
cowered, and the other three all looked down at the table.

"I'll just reinstall," Kurt said. "That's the beauty of these
things. It's a standard distro, I just copy it over, and biff-bam, it'll
come right back up. No problem. Take me ten minutes. We've got plenty of
time."

Then, five minutes later, "Shit, I forgot that this one has a different
mo-bo than the others."

"Mo-bo?" Alan said, amused. He'd spotted the signs of something very
finicky gone very wrong and he'd given up any hope of actually doing the
demo, so he'd settled in to watch the process without rancor and to
learn as much as he could.

"Motherboard," Kurt said, reaching for a spool of blank CDs. "Just got
to patch the distribution, recompile, burn it to CD, and reboot, and
we're on the road."

Ten minutes later, "Shit."

"Yes?" Alan said.

"Back off, okay?"

"I'm going to call them and let them know we're going to be late."

"We're *not* going to be late," Kurt said, his fingers going into claws
on the keyboard.

"We're already late," Alan said.

"Shit," Kurt said.

"Let's do this," Alan said. "Let's bring down the two that you've got
working and show them those, and explain the rest."

They'd had a fight, and Kurt had insisted, as Alan had suspected he
would, that he was only a minute or two away from bringing everything
back online. Alan kept his cool, made mental notes of the things that
went wrong, and put together a plan for avoiding all these problems the
next time around.

"Is there a spare?" Alan said.

Kurt sneered and jerked a thumb at his workbench, where another junction
box sat, bunny-ear antennae poking out of it. Alan moved it into his
tub. "Great," he said. "Tested, right?"

"All permutations tested and ready to go. You know, you're not the boss
around here."

"I know it," he said. "Partners." He clapped Kurt on the shoulder,
ignoring the damp gray grimy feeling of the clammy T-shirt under his
palm.

The shoulder under his palm sagged. "Right," Kurt said. "Sorry."

"Don't be," Alan said. "You've been hard at it. I'll get loaded while
you wash up.

Kurt sniffed at his armpit. "Whew," he said. "Yeah, okay."

When Kurt emerged from the front door of his storefront ten minutes
later, he looked like he'd at least made an effort. His mohawk and its
fins were slicked back and tucked under a baseball hat, his black jeans
were unripped and had only one conservative chain joining the wallet in
his back pocket to his belt loop. Throw in a clean t-shirt advertising
an old technology conference instead of the customary old hardcore band
and you had an approximation of the kind of geek that everyone knew was
in possession of secret knowledge and hence must be treated with
attention, if not respect.

"I feel like such a dilbert," he said.

"You look totally disreputable," Alan said, hefting the tub of their
access points into the bed of his truck and pulling the bungees tight
around it. "Punk as fuck."

Kurt grinned and ducked his head. "Stop it," he said. "Flatterer."

"Get in the truck," Alan said.

Kurt drummed his fingers nervously on his palms the whole way to Bell
offices. Alan grabbed his hand and stilled it. "Stop worrying," he
said. "This is going to go great."

"I still don't understand why we're doing this," Kurt said. "They're the
phone company. They hate us, we hate them. Can't we just leave it that
way?"

"Don't worry, we'll still all hate each other when we get done."

"So why bother?" He sounded petulant and groggy, and Alan reached under
his seat for the thermos he'd had filled at the Greek's before heading
to Kurt's place. "Coffee," he said, and handed it to Kurt, who groaned
and swigged and stopped bitching.

"Why bother is this," Alan said. "We're going to get a lot of publicity
for doing this." Kurt snorted into the thermos. "It's going to be a big
deal. You know how big a deal this can be. We're going to communicate
that to the press, who will communicate it to the public, and then there
will be a shitstorm. Radio cops, telco people, whatever -- they're going
to try to discredit us. I want to know what they're liable to say."

"Christ, you're dragging me out for that? I can tell you what they'll
say. They'll drag out the Four Horsemen of the Infocalypse: kiddie porn,
terrorists, pirates, and the mafia. They'll tell us that any tool for
communicating that they can't tap, log, and switch off is
irresponsible. They'll tell us we're stealing from ISPs. It's what they
say every time someone tries this: Philly, New York, London. All around
the world same song."

Alan nodded. "That's good background -- thanks. I still want to know
*how* they say it, what the flaws are in their expression of their
argument. And I wanted us to run a demo for some people who we could
never hope to sway -- that's a good audience for exposing the flaws in
the show. This'll be a good prep session."

"So I pulled an all-nighter and busted my nuts to produce a demo for a
bunch of people we don't care about? Thanks a lot."

Alan started to say something equally bitchy back, and then he stopped
himself. He knew where this would end up -- a screaming match that would
leave both of them emotionally overwrought at a time when they needed
cool heads. But he couldn't think of what to tell Kurt in order to
placate him. All his life, he'd been in situations like this: confronted
by people who had some beef, some grievance, and he'd had no answer for
it. Usually he could puzzle out the skeleton of their cause, but
sometimes -- times like this -- he was stumped.

He picked at the phrase. *I pulled an all-nighter*. Kurt pulled an
all-nighter because he'd left this to the last minute, not because Alan
had surprised him with it. He knew that, of course. Was waiting, then,
for Alan to bust him on it. To tell him, *This is your fault, not mine.*
To tell him *If this demo fails, it's because you fucked off and left it
to the last minute.* So he was angry, but not at Alan, he was angry at
himself.

*A bunch of people we don't care about,* what was that about? Ah. Kurt
knew that they didn't take him seriously in the real world. He was too
dirty, too punk-as-fuck, too much of his identity was wrapped up in
being alienated and alienating. But he couldn't make his dream come
true without Alan's help, either, and so Alan was the friendly face on